Furniture for Man

Over a period of approximately ten years I designed and created a series of nine figures in Bisazza gold mosaic tesserae. I called them Furniture for Man. They are all placed on parallelepiped bases made of rough galvanized sheet metal, serving as cabinets. These items of furniture feature nine elements which symbolize or describe contemporary man: his face, a glove, an elegant shoe, an evening jacket, a neoclassical teacup, a bedside lamp, a manager’s briefcase, a Borsalino hat and a star.

What makes them unique is their gigantic proportions. They’re not normal, but exponentially oversized. They are macro-sized objects. They are gigantic, out- of-scale creations which represent in part the decomposition, the breaking down, of bourgeois man, a giant character transformed into a collage. Deconstruction and reconstruction of contemporary man as a monument to the norm. A series of fragments of his body, elevated to fetish status, clothes and items, evocative of emotions and distant rooms. Deviant dimensions, a game of pursuit of size, of nonexistent relationships and behaviour, played out in a mysterious golden aura which expands and reflects on isolated, solitary items of a man who has become the symbol of himself.

Self-contemplation and self-description, a tribute also to the pictorial macro-miniatures of Domenico Gnoli. Metaphysical? Man is under analysis, a magnifying glass blows him up and coldly puts him under the spotlight: as a thing and a psyche. And while objects assume gigantic proportions, the rooms containing them become tiny, in a disconcerting series of meanings. The balance is broken, all proportion is lost, vertigo takes over, size has disappeared, these classic residual traces of mental man have become merely a game, a trompe-l’oeil: little and large, huge and the opposite.

Alessandro Mendini